Though poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti make cameos, more than Beats connect these documentaries turned all-star concerts. Both films show blues-rock Americana in fine form: Don’t Look Back finds D.A. Pennebaker tailing a young, brash Bob Dylan on tour in England and at a musical crossroads; The Last Waltz‘s Martin Scorsese films the Band’s “farewell” gig and its pantheon of music greats — Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, the Staples, Neil Young, and Dylan in a crossover appearance. Both include interviews that yield nuggets of brilliance, including Robbie Robertson deadpanning on the Band’s controversial breakup: “Twenty years on tour? I wouldn’t even begin to discuss it.” (DO)

For someone who’s been to Cloud Cuckoo Land, Paul Muldoon is a pretty grounded poet. In 1999, Muldoon wrote a translation of Aristophanes’ The Birds, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet takes us far from such mythological abstractions and into the real, wrought world in his new collection, Horse Latitudes. With a voice that manages to be at once arch and accessible, Muldoon points out the obvious — a funereal wake is “the apogee, you know, of the typo” — and the tragic — “those were my Twin Towers, right?” The prolific, meticulous wit reads from his tenth volume tonight courtesy of Housing Works, whose bookshop is itself a treasure as buried as the branching meanings of Muldoon’s verse. (DO)

In reams of verse through history, the poet is made to howl after the losses of life and loves; three more tonight have called on grief for a muse. Pulitzer winner Yusef Komunyakaa‘s tensely muscular writings have taken on Vietnam and jazz at full volume. His latest is a verse play that trails Gilgamesh, tearing through the underworld in search of his lost friend. He reads tonight, alongside KGB Bar mainstay Marie Howe, whose second collection, What the Living Do, also riffs on the urge to sift through loss. Eve Grubin rounds out an evening of solid Downtown lit — and the syncopated, stumbling pain of her poem “After” is a meditation on living meant to be heard aloud. (DO)